It is a singular variety of good fortune to dwell in one place that you love for many years. To watch the mail-order twigs you and your best friend planted grow into mature creatures. For that is what plants are – creatures – when you live with them for ten or twenty years. Or more. If you don’t believe it, you have not cohabited with a wisteria.
It is different with a tree. Sure, you can plant an ornamental cherry and it will grow fast and surprise you with its girth and canopy in the time that it takes for you to go from waving to your four-year-old child who is crying on the beach because you are paddling off in a small boat without him to the time that he has gone off to university and you are the one on the empty fall beach holding back your emotions. But that same amount of time is nothing at all to an oak or a copper beech. Those fellows don’t think the way you and I do. It takes a tree like that fifteen years just to make a decision about a third-level underperforming limb, and then another five or ten years to kill it and drop it on your lawn.
Imagine if humans lived long enough to say, “I don’t think I really need that arm anymore and it’s costing me two hamburgers and a peach every week to keep it fired up and working. I think I’ll just ignore it from now on and it will eventually fall off.”
I guess we used to do that with teeth, but an arm?
For us, it is more often the things we have picked up and carried around in our arms that eventually we decide to drop. Some people are quicker at it than others: like day lilies, they dispose of even the most beautiful of blossoms the moment their usefulness is past. Others, oak-like, may become sentimentally attached to a wheelbarrow that is so rusted out it will barely carry a trowel, let alone a bag of composted manure. Shovels in need of new handles, chairs to fix, broken fishing reels: these are the dead limbs that have not quite fallen, but surely will when at last the right moment comes.
One of the great pleasures of a new home may be accumulating the things to fill it with and make it your own. One of the joys of living in a place seemingly for your entire adult life is the intermittent letting go.
Or not, if you’re not in the mood yet. With apologies to Thoreau, I say, “Simplify? Schmimplify!” Other than watching the trees grow and agreeing to disagree with the wisteria, the best thing about living in one place forever is probably gathering moss and growing lichen. If you’re not moving, why should your stuff?
